Saturday, October 12, 2013

Fantasia 2013 screeners: Tiger Mask, After School Midnighters, Les 4 Soldats, The Battery, The Grand Heist, Horror Stories, and Across the River

I may not be the absolute worst about requesting screeners for the films I miss at festivals and then never actually watching them, but I will put my track record on this matter up against any well-intentioned film reviewer who also has a day job. I've got a pile of DVDs in envelopes on my coffee table that is nearly a foot tall and they go back the better part of a decade, and it might just be time to accept that I'm not going to be putting reviews with a tag of "SCREENED AT THE 2007 FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL" up on eFilmCritic for people to scratch their heads at. Indeed, if I look elsewhere, I may be able to find a screener or two on VHS that I didn't watch.

I feel guilty about it, honestly; the wall of DVDs and Blu-rays that has built up over the same period is either a waste of money or a hedge against the day I really want to watch something and it's not streaming that month, but each of those discs represents a bit of a broken promise, and as folks who have asked me why/how I see so many movies at a festival (really, to the point where it might not sound fun anymore), I do feel there's a sort of deal between filmmakers, festival programmers, and the media: The festival does not give me a pass just so that I can enjoy myself, but because they want the event and films to get the attention they deserve, and I don't want to be a parasite. On the other hand, it's very easy to put things off when you've got the disc there; my rationale is usually that I don't want to watch it until I've got time to write about it immediately afterward, and that never happens, what with the regular This Week in Tickets schedule or wanting to push things that are now or will soon be out in Boston to the head of the line.

So, by that standard, it's probably a good thing that Fantasia moved most of their screeners on-line this year. There were some films that were only available in the viewing room, and maybe I could have gotten discs if I'd asked, but the bulk of things were either on their Cinando site or at links provided via email, and when I asked, I was told that the ones on Cinando would expire on 5 September. Thus, as you see, a whole lot of late-August/early-September dates, as I tried to see as many as I could in that window. Labor Day helped a lot. Then I wrote three-ish paragraphs on each for the TWIT post that I could circle back to later (much later than I'd have liked!), just as I did with the stuff I wrote for the "Fantasia Daily" posts.

It's actually an interesting trade-off - I think that those posts are the closest things I've done to rough drafts in a long time. It's not that most reviews and blog posts are entirely one-pass jobs, but I seldom write, stop, and revise. I probably should, but, time. I'm not sure whether it's helped the actual reviews or not; with the revision so relatively far from actually seeing the movie, who knows what details have been lost?

At any rate, I think that over two months after the three-week festival has finished, I'm done writing about Fantasia 2013. I do feel bad about not having written up the short films like I'd hoped to, but it's been too long and with too few notes, I couldn't do them justice. Next year, I'll try and find a way to do it properly.

Tiger Mask (Taiga Masuku)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

It doesn't seem like it should be especially difficult to combine pro wrestling and superheroes, especially if you're willing to let yourself be a bit of a mark for the duration of the story and accept that the feuds and angles of the wrestling half have something to them. Given how popular both have been in Japan historically, it's no surprise that Tiger Mask, a comic about a wrestler/hero, was so popular and had so many adaptations; it's just a shame that the most recent isn't what it could be.

This latest iteration starts about fifteen years ago, when trouble-making orphan Naoto Date and his best friend Ruriko Wakatsuki are visiting the zoo. A tiger seems to speak to Date, and soon he is being taken to the Tiger's Cave, where he and other runaway children will spend their childhood and teen years training under the eye of Mister X (Sho Aikawa), looking for the ones who will be worthy of wearing his three power-granting Tiger Masks. Eventually, Date (Eiji Wentz) earns that right, as do his best friend and a rather more selfish fighter. They fight in secret arenas to earn money for the international syndicate that Tiger's Cave belongs to, but when Date happens to meet Ruriko (Natsuna Watanabe) and finds out their old orphanage is in dire straits, Mister X's philosophy of only looking out for oneself starts to ring even more hollow.

Tiger Mask is disappointing in a way that resembles lack of ambition, but may very well just be low budget problems. After all, during the first act, my jaw was regularly dropping about how genuinely nuts it seemed to be; it's not very long at all after the tiger that seems to talk to Date before you've got a whole passel of orphan boys being trained by whip-wielding women in tight leather dresses, all aiming to be the one that gets to wear the skill-enhancing Tiger Masks made by Mister X. And while the idea of funding a criminal network by having these guys participate in underground pro-wrestling deathmatches is goofy, it can certainly work in this story's world. It's silly, yes, but in the gloriously unrestrained way a late-1960s comic for ten-year-old boys should be, with director Ken Ochiai and his three co-writers adding just enough edge to make it work for a later generation.

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

Go to Fantasia (or any large festival) enough times, and you start to notice little quirks in the scheduling. One which has emerged in recent years is that the animated features from Japan tend to run at or before noon on weekend mornings, probably because they attract an extremely dedicated fanbase that will fill the theater when many other festival-goers are hungover. This one, though, slotted in there as Saturday Morning cartoons, which is totally appropriate - just like it's more fun to watch horror movies when it's dark outside, kids' cartoons in general and this one in particular are more fun when you're alert and maybe feeling a bit of a sugar rush from breakfast.

Certainly, that's the state of one of its five-year-old characters - Mako (voice of Haruka Tomatsu) is highly excitable, always running at full speed. During a visit to the strangely spooky elementary school she'll be attending in the fall, she get separated from the main group along with snobby rich girl Miko (voice of Sakiko Uran) and insect-loving spooky girl Mutsuko (voice of Minako Kotobuki). They cheerfully vandalize the anatomical model in the science room, not knowing that after the kids come home, he comes to life, and Sir Louis Thomas Jerome Kunstlijik (voice of Koichi Yamadera) is not pleased with being used as a coloring book! He sends and invitation out to get the girls back to the school, dreaming of revenge, but his skeleton friend Mr. Goth (voice of Hiromasa Taguchi) suggests that maybe, instead, Mako, Mi, and Mu might be able to help prevent their home from being demolished.

For all that this movie clothes itself in spookiness, a self-contained loop of a time-travel subplot, and some weirdly adult references (although if Animaniacs could have a regular bit based on GoodFellas twenty years ago, why shouldn't a Japanese CGI cartoon give gun-toting bunnies names from The Godfather?), After School Midnighters is unabashedly for kids. It leaps past explanations or much in the way of logic the same way a kid's brain does, propelling things forward with raw energy, cuteness, and just plain being silly. The pace and loose narrative may leave grown-ups dizzy, but seldom bored. Director Hitoshi Takekiyo and co-writer Yoichi Kmori do go for a level of gross-out humor that I suspect would get the film slapped with at least a PG-13 in America at times, but never as anything truly malicious or humiliating.

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I gather writer/director Robert Morin is kind of a big deal in French-Canadian film, which doesn't surprise me from watching Les 4 Soldats; it's a very confident, assured independent film, impressive for how it can take relatively minimal activity and still make something very dramatic. Even though Quebeçois film has started to travel a bit more lately with the likes of Monsieur Lazhar and Starbuck, this low-key genre film will probably stay somewhat obscure despite telling its story quite well.

The film opens with narration that describes the status quo as a sort of economic civil war, although the situation mostly seems like armed chaos. A group of rebels take in orphaned teen Dominique (Camille Mongeau), with hard-edged Matéo (Christian de la Cortina) especially serving as her protector. In another abandoned house, they make a new friend in Big Max (Antoine Bertrand), a burly but gentle sort prone to talking to himself. When the larger group settles in to make camp, they include reserved, dreadlocked Kevin (Aliocha Schenider) in their shelter. As the unusually long period in one place continues, these four become very tight-knit, so when the leadership assigns new recruit Gabriel (Antoine L'Écuyer) to bunk with them, they're not sure whether or not they want to share the beautiful pond they've found with him.

Working from a novel by Hubert Mingarelli, Morin spends a few sentences establishing the reasons behind this civil war at the beginning but he doesn't have much interest in actually fighting it; the action is reserved for a few scenes at the start and end of the movie and the cause is rather beside the point. He mainly uses it to isolate his characters, shearing them away from what prior attachments they might have, shrinking their world physically, emotionally, and in terms of direction. The idea is to show them forming a family rather than just a unit, and Morin finds a few interesting ways to do so: The cheery-looking storage shed Big Max finds for a shelter while other groups are building lean-tos out of scrap metal, or the bickering over who gets to watch the iPod. Eventually, their ties to each other supersede those to the group, and the ethics of that is probably a question that the filmmakers could play with a bit more.

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

There's a case to be made for The Battery, although it involves an premise that I'm not hugely fond of - that the filmmakers aren't really making a zombie movie, but exploring the bond and antagonism that form between two men thrown together by chance, and that survivors of the zombie apocalypse is just the hook. I suppose you could say that it does what it's looking to do fairly well, The question, then, is whether this is a story worth telling.

Maybe if World War Z had been adapted as an anthology television series as it arguably should have been, this would have made a nice hour-long entry. It follows two independent-league baseball players - pitcher Mickey (Adam Cronheim) and catcher Ben (Jeremy Gardner), who have been making their way across New England ever since the outbreak. Mickey's the lean one in a state of denial; Ben is bearded, husky, and taking to the new abnormal surprisingly well. Their in Connecticut now, practiced at avoiding attacks, but thrown a curve when they hear another voice on the walkie-talkies they use to communicate.

The standard play, perhaps, would be for Mickey & Ben to meet up with the seemingly organized group and discover that they're better off just trusting each other, but the other group says they don't want other people and they mean it. As a result, Ben & Mickey tend to find themselves at the edges of bigger stories that might have made for the plot of a fine story-based zombie movie but wind up being less of a focus here. It's an approach that allows for some good moments between the characters, but can also allow the movie drag at points, most egregiously the end. That end is rather frustrating, both in "we're leading up to this?" terms and requiring a certain lack of common sense to get there.

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

For all the noir, caper, and pulp material I've consumed in my life, I don't know how many times I've ever actually heard someone refer to the jewels they were looking to steal as "ice", and I don't know if that's part of the vernacular in Korean. Even taking that as a given, the gimmick of The Grand Heist - a rag-tag group of thieves who are actually looking to steal big blocks of ice - still makes me grin. That it turns out to be a pretty entertaining caper movie on its own doesn't hurt.

It's not a silly thing - ice was a precious commodity in 19th-century Korea, and Baek Dong-soo (Oh Ji-ho) takes his job guarding it very seriously. Lee Duk-moo (Cha Tae-hyun), on the other hand, is more interested in books than anything else; he spends his time minding and practically living in the book store of Mr. Yang (Lee Moon-sik) while he travels the world. When the previously-antagonistic Duk-moo and Dong-soo are framed them for a crime that Minister Cho Yung-chul (Kim Ku-taek) him consolidate his hold on the government's ice-distribution business. He doesn't anticipate Duk-moo deciding to fight back and using everything he's ever read to hatch a plan that makes use of not just Dong-soo's fighting skills, but explosives expert Suk Dae-hyun (Shin Jung-keun), master of disguise Kim Jae-jun (Song Jong-ho), transport specialist Kim Chul-joo (Kim Gil-dong), disgraced archaeologist Hong Suk-chang (Ko Chang-seok), and information source Yoo Sul-hwa (Lee Chae-young).

There are two things an audience wants this sort of movie to do well: First, it has to set up a robbery that is sufficiently complex to take up a full-length feature but whose parts can be grasped fairly readily - and which can be swapped out by last-minute snafus or hidden for double-crosses and surprises - and which the audience doesn't really mind happening. Then it must assemble a team to do it which is a lot of fun, both in terms of the odd couple leading things and the entertaining array of specialists who help out. It's a tricky balance; the whole thing is no fun if the plot is simple, but make things too complex and not only does one risk losing the audience, but the things that must happen off-screen just to save time and preserve a few surprises start to feel unfair. Kim Min-sung's script turns out to be a nicely balanced thing; everybody's got their part to play, and while there are some surprises and reversals later on, it never feels like cheating.

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

You could get a lot of horror anthology action at Fantasia this year, between this Korean picture, Hong Kong's Tales From the Dark, and (mostly) America's V/H/S/2. One thing that I find interesting, looking at the three, is that curation can in some ways be as important as individual scary segments. Tales had a common author's works as source material, and V/H/S/2 had a unifying feature that at least had room for variety. Horror Stories seemed to be four or five teams working separately and pasting things together, and while they come up with enjoyable segments, the end result wasn't quite the sum of its parts.

The unifying element for the story is a high school student (Kim Ji-won) who has been kidnapped by a young man (Yoo Yeon-seok) who explains to the chained girl that that he has a rare condition that he can manage while he wakes, but to sleep, he needs the scariest stories can come up with to chill his blood. Naturally, she's going to try to escape,although to do that she needs to get him to sleep. Writer/director Min Kyu-dong's premise is silly, sure, and Yoo isn't the most threatening villain, but it will hold for four stories, and Kim establishes herself as a protagonist who is quite easy to cheer for.

The first proper story is "Sun and Moon" (or "Don't Answer the Door"), written and directed by Jung Bum-sik. In this one, grade-schoolers Sunny (Kim Hyun-soo) and Moon (No Kang-min) are driven home to an empty apartment by their English teacher (No Hyeon-hee). Their mother (Ra Mi-ran) calls to tell them to expect a package but not let anyone in. It's a nifty set-up, and Director Jung does good work in making everyone outside (and potentially) inside the apartment seem like a threat to the kids, even to the grown-ups in the audience. It can be hard to do a slow-burn thriller within the relatively constrained time of a short, and that leads to a bit of an awkward climax as Jung tries to tie everything together, but up until that point, it works.

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I had the feeling when I saw Across the River (Oltre il Gaudo in Italian) that when the time came to expand the capsule I wrote for my blog to a full entry, I would not have a whole lot to say. It is, after all, a pretty minimalist movie, and the folks who try to write a lot about those tend to find more than is actually there out of necessity. So let's keep it simple. Lorenzo Bianchini has made a creepy little movie, in part because he gives the audience the chance to fill in some early blanks which are already in interesting shapes.

It is a very basic set-up: Guy goes alone into the woods, weird stuff happens, and there's a real possibility that nobody is coming out again. There's almost no dialog and backstory is parceled out in miserly fashion toward the end - it's an hour into the movie before there is any reason to say Marco Contrada's name out loud or given an inkling of what his reason for being in these woods and the abandoned village he finds there.

Filmmaker Lorenzo Bianchini does pretty well in the atmosphere department. Start from how the woods is inherently creepy, add a crossing of running water that he makes far more portentous than it logically may be, and give away so little that it's not even clear whether what's hidden in these woods is cryptozoologic or paranormal - or what Marco's motives are, and things get thoroughly unnerving. There's something sinister about watching a man set up cameras and record other information without explanation, and by not telling the audience whether Marco is doing legitimate research or preparing to spy on other people, it's along time before the audience can get comfortable enough to do their own classifications of what they see on-screen.